Michael Deacon watches Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls furiously deny an accusation
by George Osborne that he has 'questions to answer' over the Libor scandal.

The lurking malevolence. The ominous slithering grace. The suddenness of the strike. The deadly venom.

Any zoologist will confirm it: George Osborne is a snake. But what species of snake? The black mamba is about as dangerous as snakes get, but it’s also very large, whereas the Chancellor is slight and swift. The python slowly strangles its prey; the Chancellor, in contrast, favours the vicious bite. The dasypeltis delights in its own heartlessness, feeding solely off the eggs of weaker creatures, but unlike Mr Osborne it isn’t venomous.

In all likelihood the Chancellor instead belongs to the viper family. He, like the rest of his kind, ambushes his prey at alarming speed, and is capable of deciding precisely how much venom to inject: enough to immobilise, enough to wound, or enough to kill. It is unknown whether the Chancellor feeds on a diet of small birds and rodents, but studies are continuing.

Today Mr Osborne’s prey was, as so often, Ed Balls. A week ago, the Chancellor gleefully said the Labour government had been “clueless” about the Libor-fixing scandal taking place under its nose. He now seems to have changed his mind. According to him, the Labour government was not, after all, blind to the rate-rigging; rather, it was party to it. The latest issue of the Spectator quotes him as saying that Labour, and in particular those around Gordon Brown, “were clearly involved” and that “My opposite number… has questions to answer. That’s Ed Balls, by the way.”

It’s probably fair to say that the Shadow Chancellor did not altogether enjoy reading those remarks. This afternoon in the Commons, during what was meant to be a debate about the proposed banking inquiry, he howled and flailed in furious pain at the bite the Chancellor had delivered to his ankle.

“An utterly personal allegation about me… Utterly false and untrue… He has no evidence and he knows it… He has impugned my integrity!” On and on he ranted, with the odd interval, for over an hour. He demanded an apology from the Chancellor roughly every 10 minutes; it never arrived.

While his victim writhed, Mr Osborne sat, arms folded, his face spread with a leer of satisfaction.

Unable to extract an apology from the Chancellor, Mr Balls turned on other members. “I’m going to answer the question, but it’s not made easier by the Treasury whip shouting from a sedentary position!” protested the man who spends every Prime Minister’s Question Time shouting from a sedentary position.

From time to time Mr Osborne arose, fangs glinting. “I have never seen the Labour Party and the Shadow Chancellor so rattled!” he cried. Or, as he might have put it more succinctly: “Job done.”

Except he evidently felt that the job wasn’t done. So he merrily decided to be more brazen still. “The debate has been fierce, and no doubt the partisan attacks will continue,” he said. “From my own lips,” he didn’t add.

The chamber was a bedlam of outrage, protests, denunciations and scorn. The title of this supposed debate, incidentally, was Professional Standards in the Banking Industry. When there will be a debate on Professional Standards in Commons Exchanges, we do not yet know.